Talk:Order of the Clarion Call/@comment-93.74.90.219-20170716183706/@comment-45075715-20200219091522
CC knights are totally F1-F3 in my book. With that said, I'm like that with all cavalry. The fanciest I get with cav is just positioning them carefully at the beginning of an open battlefield and then waiting for the key moment to F1-F3 so that they can flank my enemy from the side while my infantry engage from the front (although I don't F1-F3 infantry so often compared to just holding their formation/shield wall close in front of my archers unless the enemy are retreating) and my archers get endless pot shots (ideally from top of a hill). :-D I don't even bother to do that on battles that aren't challenging and often just F1-F3 all cav. I tend to play more carefully with infantry and archers, so my favorite order if I want to play more like that is Ebony with their siege x-bows on foot. If I want F1-F3 cav, I favor Clarion (with enhanced HA AI) and SL. I'm also ranged-dominant in my thinking and strategy so the cav and infantry mostly serve to distract the enemy from my archers and take out enemy archers so that my archers can rain arrows/bolts on the enemy without being left vulnerable. I think like 15th century English, so to speak -- I love my archers and every other type of unit is designed to make their job as easy as possible (and I tend to be skewed in numbers towards archers or x-bows with fewer infantry and cavalry total while ranged foot units make up the bulk of my army). BTW, how do y'all play with more than F1-F3 with any cavalry (both HA and melee)? I don't know how to get fancy with cav effectively besides charging at opportune moments with a decent starting formation/position and sometimes hold position or follow me if I need the cavalry to move to a critical area in the battlefield or to get them unstuck if they hit the invisible wall on the edge of the map. I don't even separate groupings for mounted archers from mounted melee or lances (I just charge them all at once). I love studying historical battles like how Hannibal lured the Roman infantry inwards with his infantry in the Battle of Cannae only for his light/medium cavalry to route the Roman cav, circle around the infantry, flank them and enclose them from the rear and sides, but it's another thing to execute that sort of brilliant planning effectively in a video game with limited commands, awkward hotkeys, and AI that belongs in special ED. Perhaps due to some defect in the way I play and the way cav are so powerful in vanilla, I have developed this psychological tendency to see cav of all sorts as the non-strategic option to just charge and dominate, and infantry and archers as the choice for more cautious commanders that really like to manage a battle to minimize casualties. In terms of casualties in the most difficult open battlefields, I also sustain the most with mounted melee, followed by horse archers (since I F1-F3), then medium casualties for infantry (I favor heavily armored and shielded infantry and keep them close to my archers and my archers usually dispatch enemies that get close before they can manage to even get many attacks on my shield wall), and it's rare that I lose a single archer outside of siege scenarios unless the battle is overwhelming (my archers are my most precious)... that is until I get my super upgraded CKO units at which point I abandon all other troops on open battlefields and just let them steamroll everything on mounts with fast sword and board and a bow and quiver.